“I’m completely operational and all my circuits are functioning normally.” — Hal 9000, “2001, A Space Odyssey”
We now have more information about the fatal crash of a self-driving Tesla Model X P100D electric vehicle in Mountain View, California last March, thanks to a Read More → "Maybe You Can’t Drive My Car (Yet) Part 2"
“Is there in truth no beauty?” – Star Trek episode 60
Vacuum tubes? Seriously? This is 2018.
My newsfeed lately has been filled with advertisements for tiny little headphone amplifiers sporting two shiny little vacuum tubes. You’ve probably seen them: little one-channel audio amplifiers … Read More → "Engineering as Art Form"
In music, Legato means smooth and connected, without distinct breaks. Or, in electronics parlance – analog. Analog circuits are arguably the most difficult to design and the most complex to simulate. Engineers with mystical knowledge and decades of experience toil endlessly to find just the right combination of component values that will yield the desired results. And that’s just for the nominal case.
Now, try putting that … Read More → "Molto Legato Senza Failure"
Pop quiz: Is a car a Thing?
This gets us into that perennial discussion of what goes into what group. There are tons of IoT gadgets that fit into the IoT group, but is a car one of them? After all, the car of the future will communicate with the cloud, so it will be on the internet. And it is, of course, a lower-case thing. But … Read More → "How Does a Car Talk to the Cloud?"
“One person’s car is another person’s scenery.” — Jonathan Ive
Cars are ridiculously dangerous. They’re easily the greatest threat to the average person’s life, assuming you’re not a soldier in an active warzone (even then…) or a commercial crab fisherman. For teenagers, that’s especially true. Until they’re about 20 years old, an American teen is more likely to be killed … Read More → "Please Don’t Hit Me!"
“When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.” – attributed to at least three journalists and publishers including UK publisher Alfred Harmsworth, John B. Bogart (editor, New York Sun), and Charles Anderson Dana.
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) data shows that 37,461 people were killed in 34,436 motor vehicle crashes … Read More → "Maybe You Can’t Drive My Car. (Yet)"
